Monthly Archives: January 2015

96 years ago today, on 15 January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg was detained, interrogated and murdered by right-wing soldiers under the command of socialist Defence Minister Gustav Noske. Today she is remembered around the world for her life and ideas.

Born in Russian-Poland in a middle-class Jewish family in 1873, Rosa Luxemburg emigrated to Switzerland after completing High School and enrolled at Zurich University. Whilst still a student she co-founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP, later SDKPiL), with Leo Jogiches, Adolf Warszawski and Julian Marchlewski, before being awarded a doctorate in 1897.

The following year, she moved to Berlin and joined the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD), then the largest and most powerful socialist organisation in the world. She rose to prominence on the left-wing of the SPD as a firebrand speaker, journalist and theoretician, writing works on economics, nationalism, imperialism, war, socialism and democracy.

I’ve just returned home to find this UKIP election leaflet on my door mat.

Policies for Brain-dead People. But a UKIP government? Isn’t that wishful thinking?

My eyes were drawn to the section marked “culture” and nowhere does it mention the word ‘art’. Instead, we are treated to a list of things, which have little or no relevance to culture.

At the top of the list is this predictable pronouncement:

UKIP recognises and values an overarching, unifying British culture, which is open and inclusive to anyone who wishes to identify with Britain and British values, regardless of their ethnic or religious background.

Two questions – and these are questions that I’ve posed to white nationalists when they bleat about “British culture”: what is British culture and what are British values? Readers, I have to tell you that I have yet to receive an answer. All I get for my trouble is personal abuse and paranoid assertions about how this country is being “contaminated” with “foreign cultures”. There is no such thing as “British culture”and as for “British values” one could argue that this includes bullying, an obsession with property ownership and institutionalized child sexual abuse. But we don’t like talking about those things, do we?

Well, they would oppose these things because their glorious leader is a chain-smoker, who’s rarely seen without a pint of beer in his hand. But I can’t see the connection with culture here. Can you?

Like the Tories and other right-wingers, UKIP hasn’t got a clue when it comes to culture. In fact, I would go as far as saying they don’t understand culture. When the Department of National Heritage was created under John Major in the 1990s, the word ‘culture’ was distinctly absent. “Heritage” is about paintings of dead people, statues, stately homes; in other words, it’s alien to most people’s everyday lives. Culture is a living thing and UKIP and the Tories, who are forever looking backwards, will never grasp this.

The rest of the Kippers’ election leaflet ploughs a tediously predictable furrow: shrink the state, reintroduce grammar schools, big up the military, spend more money on arms; abolish green taxes; frack everywhere; retain the benefit cap; keep bashing ‘migrants’ and so on and so forth. Their section on housing is especially woeful. There is no mention of the housing shortage nor is there any mention of possible solutions to the crisis. UKIP if you want to, the gentleman isn’t for kipping.

Just think: there are just under four more months left of this tedious bullshit.

UPDATE @ 2115 9/1/15

You know the image being used for the UKIP leaflet? Well, I’ve just spotted a similar image on Facebook being used for a YouGov advertisement.

Here it is.

The Kippers can’t even use an original image. How sad and pathetic is that?